Nets wish upon stars but NBA heaven far away

Having superstar talent is the only sure-fire way to win a championship in the National Basketball Association. It has been nearly 20 years since a team won a championship without at least one superstar player, and usually it takes two.

NEW YORK So when Kyrie Irving, a virtuoso at point guard, and Kevin Durant, one of the smoothest scorers in the game, chose the Brooklyn Nets in free agency during the summer of 2019, they seemed to be sprinkling onto the Nets the sort of pixie dust necessary to turn a team into real title contenders.

And so, for the past 314 years, the Nets firmly set their sights on a championship that, they believed, the arrivals of Irving and Durant had put within reach. But instead of taking incremental steps towards that goal, they found that their path featured endless detours.

They tried desperately to make the most of having two players as gifted as Durant and Irving, giving up draft picks and promising young players to acquire a third superstar and create one of the greatest collections of talent ever seen in the league. They changed coaches and even disciplinary philosophies to try and make this work.

For the past few months, the Nets seemed to have found some semblance of stability. They were winning games, Irving seemed to be in a good place and even Durant’s knee injury, while detrimental, was not catastrophic. But then their fragile peace fell apart again.